There is no evidence that Hans Reiser murdered his estranged wife or even that she is dead, but if jurors in his trial are convinced he killed her, they should convict him of nothing more serious than voluntary manslaughter, his attorney argued in court Monday.

If Reiser killed his wife, Nina, he did so in the "heat of passion" and didn't plan the slaying, a requirement for a murder conviction, defense attorney William Du Bois said on the third day of his closing argument in Alameda County Superior Court.

Still, Du Bois said, "it's inconceivable" that Hans Reiser killed his estranged wife, because he had no means, opportunity or motive to do so.

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Du Bois pointed to testimony that the Reisers' son, now 8, gave at Hans Reiser's preliminary hearing two years ago, in which he said he saw his mother leave his father's home after she dropped him off Sept. 3, 2006, the day she was last seen.

The boy testified again at Reiser's trial in November, but didn't repeat the statement. The prosecution would have to ask jurors to disregard the boy's testimony at the preliminary hearing to support any murder conviction, Du Bois said.

The defense has suggested that Nina Reiser, who was 31 when she vanished, could still be alive and in hiding, possibly in her native Russia or elsewhere in Europe.

"We have someone who has contacts across the world, in Eastern Europe," Du Bois said. "She's as comfortable in Europe as she is here. She's spent most of her life in Europe rather than here. We don't know all of the contacts she has in Europe."

It wouldn't have made sense for Hans Reiser to wait for two years after his wife filed for divorce to kill her, or to have done so during the Labor Day weekend, when her lawyers and other acquaintances knew that she would be going to his Oakland hills house, Du Bois said.

There was no testimony or evidence indicating Hans Reiser had been violent toward Nina Reiser in the past, Du Bois said. "If he had violently abused Nina in any way, shape or form, you would have heard about it," the defense attorney said.

Du Bois noted that prosecutors had not called Hans Reiser's one-time best friend Sean Sturgeon as a witness. Sturgeon, who had an affair with Nina Reiser, had an "equal motive or greater motive to do harm to Nina than Hans Reiser," Du Bois said.

The prosecution has tailored the circumstantial evidence to make his 44-year-old client look bad no matter what the situation, Du Bois said.

The prosecution believes Reiser removed the passenger seat of his mother's Honda CRX to transport his wife's body somewhere and hosed down the interior to destroy evidence. Prosecutor Paul Hora has also told jurors that Reiser never called his wife after a brief call to her cell phone two days after she went missing.

"So if it's clean, we can infer guilt," Du Bois said of the car. "If it's dirty, we can infer guilt. If he made a phone call to his wife only once, we can infer guilt. If he made many, you can infer guilt" on the grounds that he was trying to throw people off, Du Bois said.

Du Bois acknowledged that in the days after Nina Reiser disappeared, Hans Reiser spent nights at campgrounds, hotels and in his car in places like Reno, Manteca, Fairfield and Truckee.

"I guess that's evidence of guilt - or not," Du Bois said. "Maybe he just wanted to get out of the area and away from the police who were hounding him."

Reiser alluded to the computer programmer's unlikable personality, but said, "Odd conduct makes it easy to infer guilt until we find out the individual is odd to start with."

He added, "You may dislike him - that would put you in the majority of people who know him - but he didn't commit the crime."

Throughout his closing remarks, Du Bois has compared his client to the strange-looking duck-billed platypus.

On Monday, as he began his rebuttal argument, Hora seized on what he called "this platypus nonsense" and pointed out that the male platypus is actually quite dangerous because it has a spur on its hind foot that delivers a venom capable of causing severe pain to humans.

Many jurors smiled or laughed.

As for the inconsistencies in the testimony of Reiser's son, Hora reminded jurors that the boy was 6 years old when his mother disappeared. "He's just a little kid," Hora said. "I mean, he can't peg down times and dates like that. He's just too little."

Hora is expected to finish his rebuttal argument in Oakland today. Judge Larry Goodman will then give the jury instructions, and the panel will begin deliberating.

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